10 Oct 2011

Lol. No, really...LOL!

This article made me literally lol. You know how “lol” has become internet short-hand for anything even mildly amusing? Well, I’d like to start a grass-roots, traditional, nostalgic, “in the old days”, ye olde, post-war, pre-gothic, post-raphaelite, rennaissance movement aimed at taking lol back to its original meaning: LAUGHING OUT LOUD. I laughed out loud (several times, in fact) at the below. Brooker’s articles are always brilliant, but this one is among his best.The kind of humor I find amusing is ridiculousness. Specifically, an idea taken to a ridiculous extreme. See Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch or Eddie Izzard’s bit about Frank Sinatra’s fictional car accident in his “Dress to Kill” stand-up show for good examples of this type of ridulousness. Add the opening four paragraphs of the below to this illustrious list.I’ve highlighted this and some of the other really funny parts in red...Why does the BBC dump so much money in a big glittery bin by making glossy trailers? It turns me silver with rageAll these people should be employed to make programmes, not adverts for themBeing a pitiless blank-eyed hell-wraith summoned by the Dark Ones and instructed to walk among us spreading fear and misery, David Cameron loves the thought of the BBC being reduced in size and scope. In fact he famously described the very notion of BBC cuts as "delicious". He said this openly at a press conference, but also repeated it later, in the quiet confines of his lair.It was a pleasant yet unremarkable evening for Cameron; bathed in the warm light of glowing book embers, he had already shed that day's temporary humanlike epidermis as part of his nightly skin-sloughing ritual, and was preparing to dislocate his lower jaw, all the better to ingest the live sacrificial foal the terrified local farmers had left tied outside his cave in a desperate bid to stop him preying on their herds at night. As Cameron approached the foal, turning the air dry and bitter, the creature's fur stood on end, and it kicked and bucked in instinctive awed fear; yet there was no escape for the petrified beast, since Cameron's lizard handlers had taken the precaution of nailing it to the hard rock floor by hammering thorns through its hooves earlier that afternoon before their Master returned from His Work.Cameron paused for a moment, to observe and enjoy the spectacle of the animal's futile writhing. And as he watched it squirm on the floor below him, as he felt the cold blood of satisfaction course through his twisted genitals, he briefly recalled that day's discussion about the freezing of the licence fee, and a baleful smile flickered around the approximate area of his headlike section upon which a pair of frighteningly convincing decoy humanoid lips usually sat during daylight hours, as part of his ingenious disguise."Deliciousssssss," quoth he, and a shimmering slick of anticipatory saliva dripped from his reptilian maw and splashed upon the foal's cringing face, instantly dissolving both its eyes.Anyway, Dave (as we must call him while the sun still hangs in the sky) will presumably have been delighted by the BBC's Delivering Quality First report, which outlines all the exciting ways in which it plans to prune a fifth from its overall budget. On the face of it, there's no huge incendiary headline within, apart from the loss of 2,000 jobs. Yes, 2,000 jobs. If the Stig was being sacked, there'd be 2,000 misspelled Facebook groups demanding his immediate reinstatement. But 2,000 behind-the-scenes posts? There's a widespread suspicion the Beeb has too many managerial layers anyway, so few tears will be shed. And aside from that, most of the other savings seem to come from actions it's hard to imagine the general public getting worked up about: prunings, reshuffles and repeats rather than outright closures.That's on the face of it. The reality is that with more pressure on the BBC to be seen to be delivering value for money comes more pressure to please as much of the crowd as cheaply as possible. Which potentially means a resistance to taking risks. Sounds logical on paper, maybe – except "risks' have traditionally delivered some of the BBC's most remarkable successes, from That Was the Week That Was to Doctor Who to Monty Python to The Young Ones to The Day Today and so on. Risk also throws up things such as Bonekickers, but that's how creativity works, innit: sometimes you're going to heave out a stinker.Anyway, among all the articles detailing which bits of Radio 1 Extra will be shared with Radio 1, and which daytime shows are likely to be axed and so on, the one thing I can't find is any mention of how much the BBC spends on promotional trails. I'm not talking about the on-air trails consisting of edited highlights. I'm talking about the bespoke mini-movies encouraging me to watch such little-known broadcasts as Strictly Come Dancing; ads created not from footage from the shows themselves, but from specially-shot glossy nonsense.These things turn me silver with rage. Yeah, silver. I TURN SILVER. And they turn me silver not because they're bad – on the contrary, they're often very well made indeed – but because they have absolutely no right to exist in any civilised universe. It's like watching the BBC shit money into a big glittery bin.To shoot the recent Strictly trailer, for instance, in which celebrities lead a crowd of "ordinary folk" in a patronising pied-piper dance, I'd guess they had to close a couple of streets for several days (including one very tricky night shoot involving lots of pretty lights). It's glossily made and quite complicated, so there's also a big crew to pay. And as well as the stars themselves, all of whom require costume and makeup, I'd say they also had to hire about 50 extras. And a shitload of catering. All these people should be employed to make shows, not adverts for shows. That's like paying Heston Blumenthal millions to design a bespoke scent that'll tempt people to your soup truck, which only serves bargain soup made with cheap ingredients because that's all you can afford, having blown all the money on the smell.All that time and money to advertise a show which everybody knows about anyway. You could hold a bit of cardboard with "STRICTLY'S COMING BACK" scrawled on it in front of the lens for 10 seconds and it would have 10 times the impact. Madness.And it's not just madness in the short-term: what about legacy? If all that time and money and street-closing and dancing and filming had been used to create a show instead of an advert, they might've created something they could broadcast again, or sell on DVD, or flog to the Swiss and the Kenyans. Instead they blew it on a promo that'll air for a few weeks before getting tossed on to the ever-mounting stack of other never-to-be-shown-again adverts, which sit there gathering dust in nobody's memories – pointless visual epics informing you that the BBC sometimes broadcasts football and has radio stations.I wouldn't mind if they used the money to sew some shiny new buttons on Ian Beale's shirt. Or maybe a bunch of pitchforks and flaming torches for those terrified farmers round Cameron's way. Film that. At least it's money spent on the right thing.Original article here.